The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories

by Christopher Merkner

  “No one knows what they’re doing, Billy,” my daughter said.

  He laughed. His mouth was a gothic cage. “You go like this,” he said to me. “Not like this. Got it?”

  I nodded. I did not have it. I had no idea what he was talking about. I smelled whiskey, and I wanted a long drink. He pointed us out the back door, which he had propped open, and I could see through the back door another long bridge and a set of stairs that went down to the creek near the base of the mountain. He winked at me.

  I followed my daughter. She didn’t speak. I didn’t speak. It was, by then, late afternoon. The light fell against the face of the mountain rock in a pleasant way, so that I could see the black flies swarming against the pollen and motes. At the bottom of the stairs we went straight for the creek bed. I knelt down.

  “Not here,” she said.

  I stood back up.

  She was looking around me, around us, and back up to the prefabricated cabin. Sensing, I suppose, that we were not being watched, she moved quickly up the creek, and I followed. We walked for another twenty minutes until we arrived at the entrance to a mine portal. The entrance was boarded over. The creek was spilling from beneath the boards. She stomped into the water, across the slick rocks, and went directly to the entrance to begin yanking boards away.

  I am not great at transgressions, which makes me both a great and horrible father. She seemed to expect that I would not be able to assist her in her violation of mine property, as she did not turn around to ask for help. She grunted; noises I had never heard her make came up from her belly and her heart, and she pulled against a final plank with a yell I had actually heard her use before, somewhat frequently, with her mother. But she could not get that last plank away. She turned to me. “Someone used screws.”

  I made a face. I came over.

  Indeed, someone had screwed the planks to the wooden framing of the mine. The screws were new, shiny silver. I put my foot along the side and really yanked. It came off, and I fell heavily onto the rocks and creek behind me.

  She ducked down and went in. I scrambled up out of the water and went with her. “Watch your” became the opening of her every sentence inside that mountain. “Watch your head” and “Watch your step” and “Watch your right.” I just stayed close to her, following her deeper into the dark. I tried to keep my hand on her back. I tried to thread my finger through the hole of her shorts belt loop, but she was so fast. It’s a good thing I have such a nice body, I thought to myself, though I was hunched over and shuffling forward like a witch.

  “Tell me your thoughts on dark, damp holes,” my therapist said. “You’re clearly drawn to holes. You love to talk about them. You have some sort of obsession with them. I’m interested in the type of holes that most fascinate you, call to you, sometimes maybe come to you in your dreams. Because we all have holes, don’t we, that we want others to explore? And we know that, as we have holes, so too do others. And we like to look and explore holes to make sure theirs are like our own.”

  Indeed the mine was dark, and it was wet. But it was cool bordering on cold. It became very dark very rapidly, swallowing any of the late-day’s light that had earlier been chasing us. I turned around a few times and saw nothing—literally the portrait of nothing. My daughter used a small keychain flashlight to guide us through the passageways. Its power against this darkness was astonishing. I said nothing.

  Then she stopped and shone her flashlight into a stretch of water that appeared clouded by lime and alluvial tailings where the mine had been flooded and simply pooled. She turned to me and put a hand on my chest. “This is where things get a little weird,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Be ready. I just met her a few weeks ago. She’s in some trouble, O.K.? So am I. I’m going to show her to you now. You’ll get it when you see her.”

  I expected a dead child. I don’t know why. It might have made more sense, in retrospect, to have imagined an animal or underworld science-fiction creature. But that’s what I pictured. I thought of a dead child. “Are you going to kill me?” I said.

  She shushed me. “Just think about what we’re going to do with this information. Don’t worry about what it means. O.K.? And don’t talk.”

  She then turned the flashlight farther up the pool of water, deeper into the mine. I had to squint, but I could see, in the dim and pasty light, a woman looking back at me.

  “Hi, Hannah,” my daughter said. “It’s me.”

  The woman I could see in the pool, in a bikini, was at once familiar and yet very, very strange to me. She was smoking a cigarette, though I could not smell the smoke. She was sitting on the far edge of the pool of water, her legs submerged to her knees. Her bikini looked to be red and floral. She wore her blond hair long and back, in a bun, and she looked ruddy, with high rosy cheeks, but there was no mistaking that this woman was my daughter, older. I was seeing the specter of my daughter as an adult. She was waving. “Hannah doesn’t speak to me either,” my daughter said to me, loud enough that it seemed she wanted the woman to hear her.

  “How do you know her name is Hannah?”

  “Shhh,” she said.

  “It’s you,” I said.

  She shushed me again, this time with some force. “I know who it is, Dad.”

  Then we stood there in silence. I really didn’t know what to say. The woman remained on the other side of the water. We would have to get into the water to go toward her. I presumed that was where this was headed. Or I imagined this woman, this specter of my daughter, would lower herself into the water and swim over to us. But nothing occurred; no person of the three of us moved. My daughter kept the flashlight on this woman and the woman continued smoking.

  She had stopped waving, but she looked back at us as though we were in meaningful conversation. She nodded nicely. She shifted every now and then, and I could hear the harsh scratch of the loose mine surface beneath her when she did. Except when she would wince while moving her weight, she remained largely placid in her expression, entirely matter-of-fact.

  “Just wait,” my daughter whispered to me. “You O.K., Hannah?” she called. “Can I get you anything?”

  The woman shook her head and shifted once more. She pulled a leg from the water and the light from my daughter’s flashlight caught a surprising angle in her profile. I had not been able to see it before, but it was clear in an instant that this woman was pregnant. Her belly was enormous! She plopped her near hand on her womb. She tipped her head back and looked up to the roof of the mine. She opened her mouth and groaned.

  And then the light went out and I stood there stone silent in the dark.

  I didn’t move. I could see nothing. My eyes failed to adjust to the new light, because the new light was an utter absence of light, something I had never seen before, and something I have never seen since. The image of my pregnant daughter burned and glowed in my head, but if there are degrees of darkness there are surely degrees of silence, and I tell you I left a lifetime of relevant verbal matter stuffed inside that hole no one knows how to mine any longer.

  THE COOK AT SWEDISH CASTLE

  The cook was no cook. He had only role-played one at his grandmother’s house in Chicago as a boy. Yet flying back for his grandmother’s funeral, he found himself entirely preoccupied with playing the cook again. The prospect made his feet throb. Maybe, in the end, there was nothing larger than the cook. Even sitting in the pew, silent and solemn before the service, Able could not shake the trembling.

  And then his mother’s sister roped her arms around his neck and asked him if he would say a few words. “You are always our best speaker.” The cook nodded. The liquor on her breath was rum. “So warmhearted.” She paused, pinching her lips shut, suppressing something that had come up from her belly. “You’re just the most warm.”

  Leaning against the baptismal font at the front of the church in a tuxedo was the cook’s cousin, Erik Pederson. He spoke with a dark, plump woman and periodically batted her on her heavy, bare
shoulder. When he had done this several times, the woman reached back and whacked him in the chest with the flat of her hand. The sound of the impact was loud. The two of them chortled and tried to conceal their mirth with their hands. It appeared to the cook that his cousin had coerced a woman to marry him; the woman’s ring was a salient and gaudy flash in the spare hull of the sanctuary.

  The cook lowered his eyes. He would not be caught gazing at the cousin and the wife. However, he was really shocked to see his cousin married. Really shocked.

  The cook’s cousin was an educated man, a scholar of obscure philosophies, an adjunct at some desperate midwestern state university. The man had always been a real bastard. He was about as physically grotesque a person as the cook had ever known. Right below the rim of his belt, for example, the cook’s cousin expanded enormously. It had been this way since they were kids. The chest, the shoulders, the back, the stomach—all seemed to have dropped into an expansive bubble of body flesh orbiting the waistline; something, it seemed, had always been herniated. The man’s arms were clubby with bloated, hair-thronged fingers that curled into half fists. He suffered from a cleft palate, his lip lifting to his nose and exposing his teeth in a placid grin. Also, an unseemly hunch of the spine.

  When I look out at her family, all of you just sagging there in your pews, dwelling on her life, and now, as it must be, her death, I imagine she would like to have a few things uttered on her behalf. For starters, she might ask that you please stop calling her Mothball.

  The Edens were stopped dead in all eight lanes, both directions. The Pedersons and Leifs were one long snake in the right-hand lane, their headlights turned on in the blazing sunlight, a pathetic gesture. Through the bright windshield of his rental car, the cook gazed at the dogs cluttering the rear window of his cousin’s Lincoln ahead. It was all torsos and heads back there, banging around, slathering.

  The Leifs and the Pedersons were drunk, all of them, even the children of the children. Blitzed, they sprawled on the grandmother’s living room furniture laughing about the woman’s final days in her hospital bed, the visits they’d paid her, the things she’d said in the madness that preceded her death. Then, one of the Pedersons suggested that nothing would make the grandmother so proud as to look down on them and see another Swedish Castle. The cook immediately produced a wooden spoon and a paring stiletto like a card trick from his pants pockets.

  There had been no resistance, only brief confusion, when the cook’s cousin insisted on taking the part of the queen. The cook certainly had nothing to say about it. None of the boys had ever played the role of queen before, but if he protested, he would have had to speak directly to the man and so far he’d avoided doing so.

  She didn’t pick up. The cook studied his cell phone for several moments, checking and rechecking he’d dialed the correct number. He had. He dialed again and again received only his own recorded voice. The cook pondered the things she might be doing with their eleven children at this hour. He didn’t leave a message.

  Of course, there, down the hallway and around the corner, in one of the bedrooms of the grandmother’s house, is the cook’s cousin showing the cook a way to peel the skin off a hot dog, a way to suck on certain pieces of candy, a way to play a musical instrument with the lips and cheeks of the mouth. The cook is nine, ten, and eleven there; the cook’s cousin fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen.

  The queen strode from one side of the living room to the other in a tiara and cape. The monologue was pretty good, obviously prepared: “What must a mother do to her daughters, what must a daughter do to her mothers, her many mothers, to induce harmony like a child in the home?” The queen allowed her question a silent moment, then answered it with a firm fist on the top of the piano. “Harmony must be sired! You cannot wait for harmony. You cannot seduce harmony. You must beget such things.” Oh god, he was good, the new Pederson queen; the cook could admit that his cousin was a very good queen indeed.

  Still not home, or you’re not picking up. I’m worried. Also, I’m obviously sorry I didn’t get that flight. Also, I’m drunk. This was harder than I thought. Listen. Look, tell Inger to go to that orientation tomorrow without me; he’ll be fine. Have the Ingvilds drive him if he gives you crap. They owe us, anyway. Look, I’m sorry. Everyone here is sad, worse than I can remember.

  The cook’s cousin left the house to smoke a cigarette and to let his dogs out of the Lincoln to run them. He had three dogs total, it now appeared; the cook watched them from inside the house, through the kitchen window. The grandmother’s front yard wasn’t large, and it shared a small fenceless lawn with the neighbors on either side. The queen, still in his tiara, threw a blue racquetball for the dogs to charge after. The dogs were large, muscular. They ran after the ball with force, fought and wrangled over the thing like it was raw meat, and then they returned it to the queen’s feet with a sort of palsy. They did this numerous times. They were ridiculously oversized compared to their owner, and when the queen picked the ball up and held it above his head, the animals propped their legs on his shoulders and lapped the man’s face with their tongues. The cook considered whether the cousin’s head might fit inside the mouth of one of the dogs.

  When the dogs were brought indoors, Per Hans Leif protested. “What if the dogs shit, how will the house be sold?”

  “The dogs have already shat,” the queen said with coldness. “They’ll rest quietly in one of the back bedrooms.”

  “Then at least put them in Mothball’s room—it already smells like shit.” All were too drunk to maintain interest in this issue. The queen took the dogs away. The children sat around the coffee table and drew panties on the naked women in Grandfather’s nudity magazines, unearthed from the basement.

  “What I don’t understand,” the queen’s wife protested to the room, “is why I have to be a ghost. I am no ghost. I’m like one of these ladies, you know, who is bigger than the picture. I am no ghost. I have never been some flimsy thing to shake sticks at. Look at me. Look at this!”

  The cook had a hand at his back. It was the queen’s hand, and it slipped around his waist. Before the cook could shift away, he was pulled close to his cousin, so close he could feel a hot, damp armpit wetting his pant leg, the thick ungainly waistline of the queen pressing against his thigh.

  “Some group,” the queen said. “Some fucking group we got here.”

  The cook nodded.

  “So,” the queen said, “I’m going to need you to repeat your eulogy from earlier.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I liked it. It was warmhearted.”

  The cook said nothing.

  “I need warmhearted, Able. You see what I’m doing here as queen. You see that I need some warmheartedness to round out the treachery.”

  “Maybe you should just scale back on the treachery.”

  “That’s a thought,” the queen said. “But do you know what I’m thinking?”

  “I don’t care about you.”

  “I’m thinking about how much sweeter you used to be when you were younger.”

  The cook expected the dogs to be there when he stepped into his grandmother’s bedroom. He put his knee through the bedroom doorway first. And, as he expected, he felt a bony face against his knee. He shoved the dog backwards, into the room, closing the door behind.

  He went to the bed, sat down. The dogs thrust their faces into his lap. They were happy dogs. He petted them for a short time. The cook listened to his family guffaw and chortle as they sprawled about the grandmother’s living room. He could hear the queen through the door requesting a jester to juggle something, wine glasses it would seem, and when the shattering of glass shortly followed, the house quaked with lusty amusement. With his stiletto knife, the cook cut a deep line across one dog’s pretty throat. The dying was silent, mostly clean, and without evident suffering. Eyes rolled. The mandible dropped. What stung the cook was the sight of the other two dogs backing away. They studied the dying dog and cowered into the corner, whining so
ftly, or at such a removed and lofty pitch they might have been in another room of the house, perhaps another house altogether.

  In the third act, the queen had some doubts. These were doubts he claimed he could never utter to his most trusted lords and confidantes, doubts about his decision to disembowel his own parents. “It is trying,” the queen contended, “to have to willingly disembowel one’s parents.”

  He weighed his heart as such, feigned torment over his dilemmas, and when the servant entered the stage, the queen wheeled and ordered the immediate death of his parents—he could delay the dirty thing no longer, he barked, lest it burden his conscience further and all of Swedish Castle see his doubts.

  The Pedersons nodded, and the Leifs examined the dead grandmother’s carpeting. No one was following. The servant, the youngest cousin of the cook, departed without a word to her script, and the queen leaned like a fop on the piano.

  I’m at a loss here. I’m at my wit’s end. I’m trying to understand where you are, but I don’t even have a guess at this point. Where do you take eleven children in the middle of the night? Anyway, it’s almost three o’clock your time. I have done something I shouldn’t have. Call.

  Surprising everyone, the king (the cook’s older sister) opened the fourth act with a sudden announcement that would, she claimed, “spare the queen his mortal doubts.” The king revealed a secret she’d just heard: the princess was illegitimately with child. “Therefore,” the king announced, “the princess would be the more fitting substitute for a disemboweling, if in fact the queen felt he could no longer go through with the disemboweling of his own parents.” The princess was being played by the servant’s newborn, Lily, seven weeks old.